Comment on David Brooks, Midlife Crisis Economics

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/opinion/brooks-midlife-crisis-economics.html

The type of big government is exactly the question I would address. The type that claims the right to torture and murder its own citizens without due process of law, to violate its own Bill of Rights, is one of which I would rightfully be more afraid than the most insidious of corporations.

It may seem okay, at first, to justify such abuses by claiming it’s only for terrorists, but who defines what a terrorist is? And how do we prevent a frightened elite from redefining it downward until anyone protesting maldistributed wealth, or unjust wars, or racism, or any just cause they feel strongly about, is considered to be a terrorist?

As for Newt Gingrich, living in Japan, as I do, I have to agree with concerned citizen. Making young people responsible for keeping their schools clean is an excellent way to impart a work ethic, a spirit of community, and a distaste for vandalism. He should be applauded for it but not for the way he proposed it. I would not single certain children out to do it for pay. It would simply make them objects of teasing and bullying and likely be counter-productive. Much better that all students participate, as part of their learning experience.

Comments on Stanley Fish, The Old Order Changeth

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http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/the-old-order-changeth/

The Digital Humanities, come to save us all. What, exactly, are they anyway? The semiotics of tweets? Facebook walls as literature? Flash fiction? The six word story? The opinions of the willfully ignorant as expressed in the comments of Yahoo.com? 

Can we not get back to reading texts as primarily historical documents that tell us from whence our culture sprang, so we might have a better understanding of it, in turn writing better grounded texts, and quit imposing, post hoc, the moral judgements of a more enlightened (is it?) era? Did we not, somehow progress to where we’re at over time? Was there no intellectual history prior to Franz Fanon? Would anyone even know, today? Did a higher morality just suddenly emerge without precedent from the minds of oppressed colonials? Did they not themselves become the oppressors of their own peoples, i.e. Robert Mugabe, once regarded by the doctors of political correctness as the beacon of hope in Africa? Did not many other post-colonial leaders follow the same absolutist path?

Don’t Tax the Rich?

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Tax inequality?Ian Ayres of Yale and Aaron Edlin of Berkeley presented an innovative tax proposal in today’s NYTimes. It’s an interesting idea, one designed to use the tax system to cap income inequality, but to cap it at the rate of thirty six times the median does not go far enough to ameliorate our situation. Nor do the authors explain how the burden would be levied. Does it mean the IRS would confiscate all income over 36 times the median? That would mean those in the bottom half of the !% would pay none of it, while those in the top half would their incomes dramatically reduced. The small businessman, therefore, would have no incentive to raise his workers’ salaries to keep the differential down, whereas larger companies might be so inclined, but only those of their most valued employees.

A much better way might be to cap the tax deductibility of all executive rewards at a certain desired multiple of the median corporate payout. This would encourage companies to reduce the inequality of rewards overall, discourage jobs off-shoring, and encourage productivity raises that have for so long been lacking, thus helping to raise consumer demand, which for so long has been flagging.

The New York Times Wouldn’t Take My Comment (for twelve hours).

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As I wrote on Paul Krugman’s column today submitted at 11:40 p.m. EST, (I will try and recreate the gist since comments now disappear as soon as they are sent:

I have to agree with you regarding the Republican candidates, but the voters themselves are somewhat smarter than you give them credit for. That’s always been one of the failings, though, of the academic left, which is why it has proven so effective for Fox News and the G.O.P. to accuse the ya’ll of Elitism. The Dems have had a problem for years connecting with the rank and file, ever since the draft dodgers tried to recruit them against the war, in which they had already served with honor, so the so-called New Left college boys wouldn’t have to go and fight. Now, some of those New Left college boys are Conservative chicken hawks today.

Back in the days when I used to consult for Democratic candidates, we would visit union halls and listen to the aspirants for public office trying to connect with people, unaware they were talking down, but you could tell the members knew it. They’d be sitting on their hands. What we the people in this country want is candidates who will speak to us honestly about the country’s future in terms that we can understand and that take account of us, but we also want to feel those words are backed by a real commitment to us, and when candidates strain to make that connection, we recognize them for what they are, and they have no future in politics. There is nothing wrong at all with Kansas. The people there just don’t like fat cats dressed in a poor man’s suit.

With the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, the Dems are showing their true colors. The fact that they and the G.O.P are just a good cop/bad cop act in what Sheldon Wolin calls an inverted totalitarian state could not be more apparent. We’ve been fighting this phony war on terror now for eight long years, with bipartisan support, and a war on the poor for forty years. That’s all over but the shootings, and we didn’t have a policy of assassination by executive fiat until the Occupier movement took hold, so perhaps the two are connected, somehow.

Over the past 40 years, we’ve permitted the .01 percent to abscond with the nation’s economic surplus, to the benefit of no one but themselves. They have enough money between them not only to pay off the national debt, but to live quite comfortably afterwards. They fancy themselves as job creators, and believe they should go through life and death totally tax free. So please tell us, job creators, where are all those jobs you’ve created? Perhaps you refer to those lucky few building your palaces, aeroplanes and yachts for single digit multiples of the hourly minimum wage.

So along comes Occupy Wall Street saying we should raise your taxes and end your casino gambling habits and we get this Defense Authorization permitting the assassination of anyone the executive branch deems to be a terrorist threat. Are they saying that National Security is equivalent to the letting the Plutocrats privatize the nation’s surplus, and anyone who advocates taxing it away will be branded a terrorist and shot?

What kind of people will we be when permit that to happen?

L’Etat ces moi, it was famously said. When the plutocrats become the state, and the state becomes the enemy of the nation, it is time for the nation to obliterate the state.

Obama tells Labor: F*** Y**

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The Future of the Obama Coalition

 

I suppose it was inevitable that the Jackass party would abandon the last leg of its traditional base in favor of the New Left, but it distresses me to the core of my being. The identity politics crowd and the academic Liberals have done nothing to stop the conservative drift of the party on economic issues. The last bastion of opposition to neo-liberal Corporatism, other than the occupiers, is organized labor. The snobs have taken over the party and working people are under the bus. Perhaps this explains why the Homeland Security Department was coordinating with the police to break up the Occupy encampments. Organized labor has always provided the foot soldiers the Democrats needed to win. Without the backing of labor’s rank and file, the party has always lost the White House, and the one New Leftist, George McGovern, was the biggest loser of them all.

What message, I wonder, does this send to the Occupiers? 

In my novel, Banana Republican Blues, “we don’t need you anymore” is one of the refrains. Isn’t that the message both parties are giving us today? The novel is a protest against the marginalization of the hard-working middle class for the benefit of bankers and speculators. I can just see what Faux News is going to make out of this. How much of an interest will Blacks and Hispanics have in the party if labor issues are no longer its primary concern? The time has come to form some new political coalitions and parties that do not include the ubermenschen.

Examining the big lie: How the facts of the economic crisis stack up | The Big Picture

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In Economics 101, the economics faculties used to trot out the “Tragedy of the Commons” problem to show us how inferior socialism was. The thesis was later discredited when scholars were able to show that a regulated commons was able to thrive for quite a long time. But, it never occurs to these Elmer Fudds that their much vaunted markets are also a commons, and when they are unregulated, they operate like manic depressives.

In my novel on this subject, the following conversation transpires:

“I’m sorry, but I don’t get it. Your clients were paying you exorbitant fees to manage their money for them, and you couldn’t even play the game by its most basic rules?”

He was just about to say, as she paused, that nobody wins the game anymore playing it by the rules. Then it occurred to him everyone loses when nobody plays by the rules. The Tragedy of the Commons becomes The Calamity of the Market. The bugaboo of communism is the oobagub of capitalism. But, before he was able to speak his mind, she finished her thought with a zinger.

“What were you trying to do,” she demanded, “sabotage yourself?”

via Examining the big lie: How the facts of the economic crisis stack up | The Big Picture.

Craven Political Crudités – Readers’ Comments – NYTimes.com

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Taking issue with another comment, Josiah Wright speaks to a constituency that has largely been left out in this country. It is a constituency of loyal and productive citizens, nonetheless. What you call anti-American is to them a simple expression of frustration and anger at having been ghettoized and abandoned for so long.

Obama did not grow up in the black community. He had little first hand experience of poverty and racism, and no, he was not assisted by affirmative action, though he probably never would have gotten into Columbia or Harvard, because of the color of his skin, before the Civil Rights Act. He was raised by a white banker, received his education at elite private schools and, no doubt, listened to Josiah Wright in an effort to understand the minds and hearts of much of his South Chicago constituency.

Regardless of what I think of Obama’s policies, when I notice the dignity he brings to the office, it makes me proud to have such a man as my President. Oppose that to the slacker, frat boy manners of his predecessor, particularly his propensity to lean on the podium with his elbow during solemn state occasions. That always made me cringe. It made me wonder if he ate state dinners with his elbows on the table, too.

That, more than anything that man did during in his time office rankled me to my innermost being. He came in promising to dignify the office following the Clinton scandals. Clinton may have been an embarrassment, but only because his foibles were made public by a Republican witch hunt, which displayed far less sense of decorum than the President himself. But his successor was extremely public with his disgraceful low-life manners, which bespoke the very corruption and vulgarization of our country’s boomer generation elites, as did every criminal act committed as Commander in Chief.

The political/economic elite in this country, on both sides of the aisle, has long since demonstrated its incapacity to lead us anywhere but over the cliff we are currently free-falling from. The time has long since arrived for a new paradigm to replace  global  Corporatist neo-liberalism.

via Craven Political Crudités – Readers’ Comments – NYTimes.com.

The Enduring Cult of Kennedy – Readers’ Comments – NYTimes.com

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You can say what you like about Kennedy, but he did get the media to shine a spotlight on the great unfinished business of Democracy. I was only eight years old at the time that he was elected, but I read the paper and the weekly news magazines and I was very aware of the world. The spotlight was on poverty, in the rural south and the urban north. He made my parent’s generation, The Greatest Generation, aware of the things that needed to be done to put the country on the right track and people responded to that.

Those who had known the depression, and fought the Nazis, and the Communists in Korea, and lived through the McCarthy Era and the dull corporate conformism of the 1950s, eagerly accepted the new mission that Kennedy assigned to them.

In the Nixon era, my boomer generation was disillusioned by the war, disillusioned with Liberalism, and descended into the hedonism. The media was full of the cultural detritus of sex, drugs and rock ‘n Roll. That hedonism would reach full flower during the Reagan Era, when the mission became, get rich quick any way you can. One needed to, to afford cocaine. Since then, the media has been full of what? The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, celebrity gossip, and the cultural detritus of glam and bling. Thirty years later, where are we?

Markets have collapsed, trade unions are broken, the middle class is decimated, a lucky few got rich, but the rest have either been impoverished or, even with two incomes, are a paycheck removed from poverty, and more fearful of losing what little they have than hopeful enough to take a chance on ameliorating their lives by reinvesting in public goods.

Some of us still believe in the mission Kennedy assigned us, that of ameliorating poverty. Even if it isn’t the Christian thing to do anymore, you will have a hard time of convincing us that it isn’t the christian thing to do. But the drug addled leadership class that steered us away from that mission needs to recognize its illegitimacy and finally, step aside.

http://bonalibro.us

via The Enduring Cult of Kennedy – Readers’ Comments – NYTimes.com.

The Value of a Well Made Thing.

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One of the points I make in my book, Banana Republican Blues lies in following passage:

Eddie spent his night in jail pondering his situation and composing his Doctrine of the One True Chili. The titular topic was a very small part of Eddie’s aggrieved philosophy. It repudiated everything he once held true, except for the value a truly good meal, cooked with something more in mind than extracting the maximum profit from it. It extended to the value of the well made thing that built his family’s fortune, and from there to the value of labor. He recalled what Abraham Lincoln said about capital being the fruits of labor, as his family’s capital once was.

All the wealth passed down to him, unearned by his own agency, was gone because of his foolishness. Now, having spent but a few days working for his pittance, and expending it as he was wont, like a man accustomed to privilege, he began to see the justice of it. No one who’s awarded more than he earns should have the right to its enjoyment, for he has no sense of the value of it; while he who earns more than his award should not only have the benefit of it, but should husband it more wisely, that he might accumulate capital and increase it with his labor.

 

I find this point confirmed, in a way, by an article in Forbes. The article makes the point, that too many people with too little sense about the value of money, and too easy access to the world’s excess liquidity, used it to play the dangerous game of borrowing short and lending long. Ted Forstmann said much the same thing in his interview on Charlie Rose. But as Apple Computer’s story tells us, it’s the value of the well made thing that always wins out in the end.

A Capitalist Muses on Profiting from Communism

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Wouldn’t it be grand if the company could move operations to totalitarian Communist countries where workers are strictly disciplined and wages are suppressed. Think of the profits we could make. Think of the bonuses we could bank. Think of all the political clout we could accumulate for ourselves by spreading all that money around in all the right places and expounding on the evils of Socialism and virtues of free trade and free markets. It would be Capitalist heaven, would it not? 

Say what? We do that now? We’ve been doing that for the last thirty years? You don’t say. And no one even calls us on it? What a bunch of dupes.